Historical Scholarship and the “Personal Guise”

In the middle of my very first job interview, I crossed a line demarcating the academic profession from my personal life. Actually, it was a post-interview “informal” discussion with the chair of an English department and three other job candidates who happened to be my closest graduate student friends, but it was a synecdochic distillation of the profession all the same. The department chair had called us together in that standard-issue mla hotel room to hear more about our scholarly progress and professional aspirations. All was going as you would expect until the chair interjected that his own area of scholarship was the folk culture of early-twentieth-century US immigrants. That is when memories of my Italian family history—half-remembered stories about huge feasts and sing-alongs in support of the Italian anarchists Saccho and Vanzetti in the 1920s, with a comical coda about the cherished records being used for target practice by destructive boys in 1950s coonskin caps—flashed before me. Here was a set of family stories, and distant historical moments, that suddenly made sense to me in the middle of the 1980s; seeing an opening, I “went there,” judging from my friends’ open mouths, and told the committee all about myself. I engage fully with the generous, illuminating spirit of Marion Rust’s essay “Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women Studies” and, in particular, her derivation of Ulrich’s second life as a personal essayist when I say that in joining together these two timelines, I found and adopted for the first time in that interview something I will call, adapting Rust’s title, “a personal guise.”

If my experience in the formative experience of the academic job interview is any guide, the personal guise is not an abnegation of or flight from scholarly self-presentation but a critical counterpart to it. Indeed, I realized then and reaffirm now that what I uncovered in that interview was not really my own past but a usable past, uniquely suited to the travails and traditions of American literary scholarship.¹ This past was rendered visible and legible precisely because of the scholarly training I had received for the professional occasion that demanded it and the comic dissonance of that past with the occasion. I credit Rust’s creative, close reading of the “I” within scholarly labor that Ulrich so expertly made visible for my argument that both the personal guise and its modes of expression are heuristic, discoverable, and embedded within the depersonalized artifacts and pursuits of the academic profession; they are extensions and rewards of scholarly lives, not a priori conditions for them.

Of course, this is precisely what has made women’s literary criticism and essayists such as Alice Walker and bell hooks such vital contributors to our academic inquiries into the nature of personhood. Ulrich modeled this tradition and capacity through a scholarly method that insisted upon an “empiric” reconstruction of Martha Ballard’s life, a posteriori (qtd. in Rust 156).² Rust’s investigation of Ulrich’s identity follows suit by not stepping outside the evidence of her essays or Ulrich’s commentaries on the historical profession. Rust’s reading of Ulrich’s second self leaves us with a renewed appreciation of the extent to which Ulrich’s dialectical engagement with the scholarly guise of the male-dominated profession of history created both a personal space for Ulrich herself and a usable, Mormon feminist past that now, thanks to Rust’s rereading, enlivens and enriches our knowledge of the profession.

I wish more scholars would follow the path laid open by Rust’s “empiric” reconstruction of Ulrich’s second self and excavate our usable pasts. But we should not treat that personal history as a historical artifact. Women’s literary studies did not introduce the destabilizing variable of personalizing the profession just so we can turn scholars’ lives into mummified objects. On the contrary, the methods we use to recognize and re-create our personal guises take inspiration from feminism; they ask us to come to terms with the present and...